Weekend Editor

A disinformation black hole: once you pass the right-wing disinformation event horizon, there's no coming back.

To put it another way: the anti-Trump defendants are now legally less guilty than the average ham sandwich.

Live updates: Trump indicates Iran decision within days and says Board of Peace will be ‘looking over’ UN | CNN Politics President Donald Trump urged Iran to reach a deal through diplomacy and alluded to potential military action if talks fail as he made remarks at the first meeting of his Board of Peace. Follow for liv...

Trump announces he's transferring $10 bn from the US Treasury to his "Board of Peace," which critics have likened to a giant slush fund Trump will control in his personal capacity. There is no congressional appropriation for this, but Trump doesn't care. www.cnn.com/politics/liv...

New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States According to new data analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures, rising seas and changing rainfall will profoundly reshape the way people have lived in North America...

In 2020, we mapped out the danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next 30 years — combining climate data with wildfire projections by US Forest Service researchers and others.

See what changes are in store for your county 👇

Heavens. Reading old books, as we've been doing for almost two years now, is incredibly rewarding. Struggling with complex or unfamiliar ideas strengthens the mind; recognising universal human anxieties and experiences down the ages is comforting.

Plus, there are all the dick jokes in Aristophanes.

notorious radical left communist rag says tax the rich

Billionaire contributions as % of total contributions 2000 - 0.6% 2002 - 0.7% 2004 - 0.3% 2006 - 0.4% 2008 - 0.3% 2010 - 0.9% 'Citizens United’ ruling 2012 - 3.7% 2014 - 6% 2016 - 10.5% 2018 - 10.7% 2020 - 7.9% 2022 - 11.8% 2024 - 16.5%

It’s rare to see a single chart that shows us exactly when and how the rot set in 😡

No idea.

They would usually apply in the US and EU simultaneously. But if they're blocked from the US, they may not be able to make enough money to justify doing it at all?

“Is there a technology the left is excited about?”

High-speed rail! MRNA vaccines! New cancer treatments! Solar and wind energy collection! Better and longer-range EVs! That wood that's harder than steel! New apples! Fibermaxxing! Buldak Swicy ramen! Muppets! Muppets are too a technology, shut up!

Today's blog post:

Addendum re Moderna mRNA flu vax, FDA will now review. But likely too late for this fall's flu season, still repeating demands for medically inappropriate/unavailable controls, and Makary on Fox calls the trial "unethical".

www.someweekendreading.blog/fda-nixes-mr...

Except...

They scheduled it for Aug 5 (prob too late for this fall's flu?), will require post-marketing study (a vaccine Phase IV?) for over 65s, and Makary called the trial "unethical" on Fox.

And they continue to bleat about high-dose controls.

www.someweekendreading.blog/fda-nixes-mr...

Report: Staff at Dilley raiding cells to confiscate kids' letters and drawings detailing conditions inside

ProPublica published children's letters and drawings documenting their sadness and suffering at Dilley. And Dilley staff are now retaliating by confiscating kids' letters and drawings.

www.sacurrent.com/news/san-ant...

Every Trump official is fundamentally a thug

A long-ago friend of mine who was in law school told me he criticized an argument by saying, "That's ad hoc".

The response was, "Thank you!"

Love that AI, a thing we hate and don’t want, steals everything, ruins everything, shittifies everything. Drinks our water, plagiarizes our art, pisses all over our information fidelity, drives kids to suicide, serves the right-wing, and fucks up our devices and services. Good job, techbros!

You know the scene in Charlotte's Web where she weaves "SOME PIG" into her web to save the life of her pig friend?

Imagine The Very Bad Man rolling around naked in the muck, and above him Charlotte weaves her spiderweb saying, "SOME BASTARD"...

One of the few cases where private equity might be a solution: dismantling private prisons and selling off the parts.

If you are confiscating writing materials from imprisoned children because they smuggled out a letter that described the conditions they're living under, you are a literal monster and should be treated accordingly.

Including a more-or-less symbolic monarch like Charles III is an expansive definition of "leader", isn't it?

A board game called "Billionaires & Guillotines" which... well, it's pretty straightforward to work out, isn't it?

New board game observed on Mastodon.

I'm not a board game person, by any measure. But this one... is intriguing.

mastodon.social/@2dh5/116084...

Table of Contents Jerusalem is builded as a city that is in the public domain. — kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com (Prologue) BOOK I: GENESIS 1. Dark Satanic Mills (Interlude א: The Cracks In The Sky) 2. Arise To Spiritu...

There's a scene in Scott Alexander's novel _Unsong_ like this.

Imagine kaballah is real, so "big theonomy" companies are trying to monetize it into tyranny.

In one scene, the Lubavitcher rebbe walks across the water to the Statue of Liberty, makes it a golem & rides it into battle.

unsongbook.com

Pol Pot killed 3 million people. Vought and Musk have him beat three times over.

"Turning Our Back on Clean Energy: Why does MAGA hate the planet?" - Paul Krugman "America’s hard turn against renewables and climate action won’t be decisive for the climate future as long as other countries continue to move ahead on green energy, which they are. For the most part, all MAGA will do is help make the United States backward, poorer, sicker and irrelevant." https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/turning-our-back-on-clean-energy

America’s hard turn against renewables and climate action won’t be decisive for the climate future as long as other countries continue to move ahead...all MAGA will do is help make the United States backward, poorer, sicker and irrelevant" - @paulkrugman bluevirginia.us/2026/02/mond...

Can you say, "Fine Corinthian leather"?

Compromise: the UK adopts the euro, but divides it into twenty euroshillings each of five europence.

See "Fit #4", below.

When training on historical newspaper corpora, there is massive right-wing bias due to quality of paper and expensive typefaces used in aristocratic British newspapers. (Our OCR software is trained on those exact typefaces.)

www.someweekendreading.blog/llm-ai-still...

BTW, given your interests, you might like this post. It goes through some cognitive modelling, showing LLMs are really weird thinkers, as well as a paper on quantitative statistical assessment of BS (persuasiveness + indifference to the truth).

www.someweekendreading.blog/llms-make-yo...

If this country was truly “pro-life,” we would have Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, gun reform, universal child care, and a living wage.

The right-wing agenda isn’t about “life.”

It’s about control.

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

Quoted you favorably on my blog a year and a half ago. You're still exactly right.

www.someweekendreading.blog/llm-ai-still...